3월

Levitan rarely painted deep winter. He preferred its leftovers, the melting edge where the cold gives way. He made this in March 1895 while staying at a country estate in Tver province, north of Moscow, on a bright day when the snow had started to go soft and grey. There are no people in it. A horse stands harnessed to a sleigh by a wooden porch, dozing in the sun, its warm brown coat the one dark note against the blue shadows and the honey-coloured logs of the house. The horse was real and had a name, Dianka. Pavel Tretyakov, the Moscow collector whose pictures became the national gallery, bought it the next year, and Russians have loved it as an image of early spring ever since.